Globalfoundries plans New York R&D center

LONDON – Foundry chipmaker Globalfoundries Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.) has announced plans to build an R&D facility at its Fab 8 campus in Saratoga County, New York.

The Technology Development Center (TDC) will include more than 500,000 square feet of flexible cleanroom and laboratory space. Construction is expected to start early in 2013 and be completed late in 2014 and total cost of nearly $2 billion. The spending will bring the total capital investment in the Fab 8 campus to more than $8 billion, Globalfoundries said.

Globalfoundries has already employs 2,000 people at Fab 8 and that number is expected to grow by another 1,000 employees by the end of 2014.

The TDC is intended to support the transition to new manufacturing process nodes as well as to support other technologies beyond the traditional approach of miniaturizing transistors. This is likely to include interconnect and packaging for the 3-D stacking of chips, advanced mask-making and the use of extreme ultraviolet lithography. Globalfoundries made not explicit mention of the transition to 450-mm diameter wafers although that is also likely to happen in the years following the completion of the TDC.

"New York State's continued support of the semiconductor industry has created a strong collaborative ecosystem and helped pave the way for this additional investment. The new TDC will help us bridge between the lab and the fab by taking research conducted with partners and further developing the technologies to make them ready for volume manufacturing," said Ajit Manocha, CEO of Globalfoundries, in a statement. "To help facilitate this migration, we are making significant investments in strengthening our technology leadership, including growing our workforce and adding new capabilities to make Fab 8 the hub of our global technology operations."

Fab 8 is located in the Luther Forest Technology Campus, Saratoga County, New York and is set to be capableof 60,000 starts of 300-mm diameter wafers per month when fully kitted out.

It is capable of 28-nm production and development is underway on 20-nm and 14-nm manufacturing process nodes. Full commercial production was due to start at Fab 8 at the end of 2012 or early in 2013.